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Pigeons are the first ‘critter’ guides in Staying with the Trouble, Donna J. Haraway’s exploration of survival in the time of the chthulucene. [i]Pigeons are her ‘urban neighbours, iridescent sexual exhibitionists.’ They appear in her writing as creatures of the Empire, spy pigeons, carrier pigeons, pigeons that recognise themselves in the mirror, pigeons that can identify objects from a helicopter.

In Haraway’s story, racing pigeons and their trainers are put to work measuring air pollution in Los Angeles while in Australia artists build nesting towers to help bring pigeon manure to the rewilding of a piece of ancestral land. In Caudry, France, Matali Crasset, an industrial designer, is commissioned by the local authority to design a pigeonnier. Haraway asks how, ‘when the best biologies of the twenty first century cannot do their job’ we can develop ‘response-ability’, back and forth, like a game of cat’s cradle.

Tagging along after Donna, pigeons are to be my guide too. They are nearly my bedfellows after all, building nests yards from my window, importing bird fleas, bringing manure into my garden. I wake to the rattle flap of wings, the pinkish sigh of feathers whiffling the air, throats bubbling like the sound of a coffee pot.

Five, six, twelve, seventeen pigeons are roosting, preening, courting, billing and cooing, turning circles on the corner of the empty cinema next door. On the parapet where the mortar’s worn away, and the bricks look like teeth, they strut up and down, peck at each other. They perch like Batman on the rooftop, head and shoulders against the sky. Or they roost in the blocked up windows, like dollops of grey paint, that also come in cream, mauve, brown. The biggest male makes a train of his tail, jerks his green neck feathers back and forth along the back wall of the disused Savoy Cinema.

A shapeless hangar of a building, it’s not possible to tell how big it is from the outside. Its Art Deco canopy has been destroyed. The foyer is now home to Class barbers and a tattoo and piercing parlour. In the corner, now the Tava Ocakbasi restaurant, a Rasta couple sold reggae records and knitting wool. The basement, variously named the Snooker Lovers Club, the Magnolia Banqueting Suite, Epic Dalston, has been used for club nights, Hindu weddings, Afro-Caribbean wakes, bar mitzvahs, Turkish circumcision parties and a Sunday flea market. To the rear is a flat, home to some Bulgarian Turks, a recording studio, an electricity substation. The last film to be shown, in 1984, was Scarface.

One afternoon, a slight figure in orange duffle coat and striped scarf knocks on our door and introduces himself as Auro. ‘I’ve just got the lease for the old cinema,’ he croons persuasively. ‘We’re talking to all the neighbours.’ He gives me his number and says to text him day or night. ‘If you’re unhappy about anything ….. no trouble at all.’ The local paper reports a budget of several million; the restored venue is to be as big as the Roundhouse.

Auro invites us to an open weekend. A small group of enthusiasts, we climb up and up the emergency stairs, picking our way over drinks crates, spare bar stools, lost umbrellas, arriving at the very top of the balcony.

The smell of pigeons is so overpowering, it even has a colour, a chalk white grey. In the gloom that filters through holes in the plaster ceiling, the original proscenium arch stands oddly truncated, as if flooded by the floor below.

The one empty space left, the largest, is the space for film projection itself. The void left by the projection of heroes, heroines and villains onto the screen has always been unusable, it turns out. The lonely individualist, the hunter gatherer hero, remains trapped in his pyramid of light. The real reason the building has never been demolished and remains semi derelict, I learn from my partner, is that the owners are a Turkish family trust. Should the building be sold, the funds would be divided into unfeasibly small amounts of cash.

There are thumps in the street, van doors banging. Auro knows how to do things. He books parking spaces. Articulated lorries deliver thick cables, scaffolding tubes, sound equipment. Security men guard the vans. Sound checks begin at three. He boasts to the local press that he has cleared out six hundred pigeons and a sea container load of manure.

Several months on and the six hundred pigeons are living on the outside, at the mercy of cats, crows, passing seagulls, nesting kestrels. There have been sightings of a peregrine falcon. Wing claps like a carpet beating, a call to order. The flock takes off, circles the nearby blocks, swoops back up again, onto the parapet, onto the roof.

Except for the bookings that were already booked before he cleared out the pigeons, nothing much has happened in the disused but by no means empty Savoy cinema. Online Auro laments: gentrification means no more spaces for creatives like him to be creative in. He calls out the ‘municipalities’.

Faced with the nightmarish Doomsday narrative, beloved of climate change activists, where technology can’t help us and God won’t save us, I look for other narratives. In my reading I hunt for signs of hope. Donna looks for what she calls SF, string figures, ‘scientific fabulations’ to sustain and guide us into not ‘posthuman’ but ‘compost’. Instead of a doomsday narrative, we will become part of the ‘oddkin’. Stories of the chthulucene invoke the multi species ‘becoming-with’, creating stuff, breaking bread together, necessary for survival.

[i]Chthulucene, an impossible to spell made up word of two parts, chthonos meaning ‘of the earth’ and ‘kainos’ meaning time. We are nearing the end of the ‘anthropocene’ and the ‘capitalocene’.

During the week before the DSEI arms fair, protests take place on the service road into the back of the Excel Centre, by London’s Royal Victoria Dock. Lumbering up the road, along with the low loaders carrying vehicles and boats, armoured, camouflaged, tied down with net, boats, along with the white vans of caterers, fitters, cleaners, carpet layers, is one huge elephant. That is capital and the work ethic that supports it.

The arms trade is harmful many times over. It makes conflict more likely in areas of the developing world where there is already tension. Poor countries are persuaded to spend millions on weaponry rather than on infrastructure for their own people. Its industry manufactures war and bloodshed.

Being a capitalist enterprise just like any other, the arms trade, and the industry that supports it, causes damage to the climate. It is a wasteful use of natural resources. It poisons the atmosphere and water supplies and lakes and natural habitats. It hoards the technological expertise amongst its employees that could be used in other creative sustaining ways and prevents progress in other areas.

But also, being a capitalist enterprise like any other, the arms industry depends on our wonderfully strong work ethic. In his book S.O.S. Alternatives to Capitalism, Richard Swift points us to William Morris, one of the first socialists to oppose the ecological decay of capitalism and the society based on ‘useless toil’.

He also directs us to Lafargue’s, The right to be lazy. Written in the nineteenth century, by Marx’s son-in-law, this is a satire aimed at the bourgeouisie, who counted work as a religious virtue and the path to salvation. Industrialists encouraged country people away from their ‘hearths’ into the towns, to the severe detriment of the workers’ and their families’ health. Once in the factory they had no time to tend their vegetable plots, which led to malnutrition, or else had to travel long distances to work, leaving no time to look after themselves and their children.

Lafargue describes conditions for factory workers in Alsace, who worked twelve hour days to produce stockings, which they themselves had no use for, and could never afford. The factory owner then had to find new markets for his products, leading to colonialist expansion. Seen in the context of the arms trade this is particularly apt. The arms companies make something far worse than useless; the only product of an arms company is bloodshed and terror. The arms trade constantly must find new markets so the factory can stay open, so the employees can travel to their full time jobs. It must keep the factories open, otherwise there’d be a riot. The employees of the factory must be kept busy. The devil makes work for idle hands.

This discussion often gets glossed over at protests. Disgruntled passersby shout, ‘get a job’, not realising how ironic this is in the circumstances. MPs inevitably do all they can to protect jobs in their own constituency, for their own sake if nothing else. It would be impossible to tell someone to give up their job, when there is a dearth of manufacturing jobs, and when income is tied to work, but also while the work ethic is so a fundamental to our culture. As Kathy Weeks shows in The problem of work, the work ethic extends far beyond the means of survival. Work defines us socially, intellectually, by class, even by race and gender. Where the work ethic is strong, the system of favours, long hours culture, fellowship, the ritual of office parties and outings, work itself becomes morally right. We’ve all experienced jobs where we have complied with dubious practices, and not until afterwards realized that our desire to maintain a positive attitude triumphed over our own integrity.

The work ethic even extends into our children’s education, (teenagers trained to be ‘work ready’) our leisure and holidays. Who hasn’t thought of conveyor belts when we step onto a plane or ferry. But above all the work ethic spreads into our homes. Someone has to be cleaning, whether this is the same person who goes out to work, a partner or someone paid to do it. However you look at modern employment, it relies on carers, cleaners, cooks, mothers, those who care for the elderly, the very young, the sick, the destitute.

Weeks suggests that the discussion around wages for housework, while unhelpful and unsuccessful in the seventies, was a useful way of seeing how our lives are monetised, which parts of a mother’s work is work, that could be paid labour, and which is love. She quotes Federici,

“For our aim is to be priceless, to price ourselves out of the market, for housework and factory work and office work to be ‘uneconomic.’ ”

Or to put it in terms of the Gospel story we are all busy being Martha, but Martha herself has power in the work she does to resist. (Luke 10: 38 – 42)

Arms work depends on housework. An employee of the arms industry, and therefore all of us, works a full day, picks up her children, keeps her house clean, and even does voluntary work at weekends. So I propose a dirty protest! Or even more drastic, a care work protest. Or even a birth work protest. Just when we thought housework was something that stays in the privacy of our own homes, we could refuse housework and smash the arms trade.

Recently in a horrible twist, cleaning products themselves have become a weapon. Not far from Giuseppe Conlon House, two young men on a scooter carried out 5 acid attacks in a single evening. In the discussions in the media afterwards, the pundits questioned the use of strong chemicals in household cleaning.

As inhabitants of the Calais ‘jungle’ set off for the Centres d’Accueil et Orientation and as the authorities begin to dismantle their camp this afternoon, I look for links between the town and the camp, both positive and negative and some small curiousities, that the town offered up itself.

At first sight Calais seems like a sleepy town. By half past ten at night, all the houses have their metal shutters rolled down, not a peep of light shining through. A note from the neighbours on the wall of Maria Skobtsova House asks for quiet. ‘In this area,’ it reads, ‘the majority people work and go in bed on raisonable hour.’ It’s taken me two weeks to get a sense that people of Calais might ever bustle about.

Calais was our family’s favourite ‘town’ beach, to visit on the way home from camping, to grab a last minute swim and a bag of chips before catching the ferry. The minute I had visited the jungle camp my perception changed.

I wanted to be able to situate the experience of the visiting the ‘jungle’ within my experience of staying in Calais. It didn’t seem right to write about the camp in isolation. I struggled with the disconect between jungle and town, I struggled with a failure to make sense of everything I’d seen, the stories I’d heard, the people I’d met, everything I’ve been told and to know what to do with it. What happens, I thought, if I say here I am now, an english woman with memories of Calais, walking through the town, crossing canals, walking out to the camp.

So first I go to the beach.

Sand pipers, unfolding brown black white wings, in little flocks, scuttle this way and that, over the wet sand. There is the unceasing drumming of ships’ engines, as the ferries load and unload streams of cars and lorries, or as they pass each other a few hundred yards from the shoreline. Every half an hour or so another ferry from Dover slides in over the beach, blocks the view from the west. Tankers and giant container ships line up on the horizon.

In between the rows of white beach huts, a few townspeople walk their dogs, their children, stop for a chat, go for a run along the surf.

Saturday and Wednesday are market days. Arman, not his real name, a teenager waiting to join his brother in London, comes with me to buy vegetables and cheese for supper. A few minutes from Maria Skobtsova House, as we cross one of the canals, he points out the funnels of the P&O ferries. ‘Going to England’ he says. The market is much better than many I’ve been to in the south of France on holiday. We easily locate coriander, ginger, lambs lettuce, sweet sour muscat grapes full of pips. I’ve heard that some shopkeepers refuse to serve the ‘migrants’. Fresh chillies are only for sale in the camp.

On the way back, we cut through a small park. Arman tells me he is afraid to go into this park as this is where the ‘mafia’ hang out. They will approach you, sell you marijuana and take all your money for the passage to England, which he says is ‘impossible’.

At mass that evening the peripatetic parish priest blesses the children’s school bags, those famous french school bags, huge school bags. I am told that the level of education in the town is low, not many people progress beyond High School, that teenage pregnancies are high. Many shops and flats in the town centre have ‘a vendre’ signs in the windows, a sign of the economic straits .

But there is another side. When we walk to the house for prayers at eight o’clock, or walk home at night the streets are deserted, and yet whenever we pass someone in the street they nod and say ‘bonjour’ just as in the camp everyone says ‘salaam’ and shakes hands, puts one hand on their heart.

Where Calais residents and the camp cross paths, where there is a peaceful exchange held the most hope.

At the spotless regional hospital, outside the town near the motorway, volunteers from Maria Skobtsova House, often refugees themsleves, go from room to room to visit patients from the Jungle Camp bringing fruit, clothes, once a week spicy food. Two of the patients we visit have Lyme’s disease, mysteriously, picked up along their long journey but mostly we go to the first floor where there are injuries either from the dougar , or in a fight. Down at the entrance there’s the usual crowd of people you’d see outside any hospital, smoking, pushing drip stands.

At the centre for refugees, run by Secours Catholique, on a women only day, a group of volunteers have come from nearby Arras. They bring games and toys for the children, some give the women a French lesson. They eat lunch together. One woman has brought apples from her own garden, so we sit round peeling and coring them to make apple compote.

As I spend days in Calais, I see that in the places where the town crosses the paths of the jungle, or where the jungle crosses the paths of Calais, Calais has some unexplained curiosities of its own.

One Sunday I go with some Iranian Christians to the Anglican church, but the front door lock has been jammed with superglue. A member of the congregation tells me this has happened before. Only the Protestant churches have had their doors glued shut.

On the road to the Jules Ferry centre, almost always thronging with people, walking to charge their phone, pick up food and information, a man drives a quad bike, loaded with boxes of live ducks. Once I’d seen this several times, receiving no satisfactory explanation, one of the volunteers remembers: it’s beginning of the duck season. There aren’t any ducks so they have to bring them in. So soon next to the jungle camp there will be a duck shoot.

Duck shoot

On the same small road, people climb into the trees to pick up the phone signal coming from the nearby houses. All along the Rue Mollien, outside LIDL, along the railway track, on the vast factory lawns, small crowds gather, wherever there is 3G.

Even though the shop keepers protested the presence of the camp, they missed a trick really. If they can stock coriander and ginger surely they could stock chillies. The jungle camp inhabitants will soon be potential customers, then students, teachers, nurses, business owners themselves. The phone companies could have made sure there was adequate reception.

These were ways the jungle camp and the town crossed paths. The camp is not suspended in a cloud over Calais. It is only divided from the town by a flyover, not even a fence, but I saw so many signs of growth, in faith, business, encounters in several languages at once, hospitality from all directions. People eat together, care for each other, worship together, greet each other in at least five languages. These things hopefully will not be destroyed by the démantlement.